La Creole had to be close at daybreak, just in case: Ramage had been most emphatic about that. He personally did not think they would see the Frenchman at dawn whichever day she arrived, but there was always a chance that she sailed at the proper time and made a fast passage, which would bring her off Curacao at first light. No gambler would ever bet on a Frenchman being punctual, but the whole success of the operation depended on La Creole: be had made sure that Lacey really understood.
Ramage looked through a gun port He could just distinguish the toppling waves; they had a grey tinge, and the stars low on the eastern horizon were dimming slightly, Orion's Belt had crossed overhead and dipped, the Southern Cross and the Plough had revolved, Polaris had remained fixed, and the sun would soon be dazzling them all. Yes, Sint Christoffelberg was over there on the starboard beam so high that it was distinguishable as a black wedge pointing upwards and obscuring the stars low on the north - eastern horizon.
Somewhere in the darkness on deck three men waited, one at each mast, for the order sending the lookouts aloft - it would come from Wagstaffe this morning - and then each would race up the ratlines like a monkey, hoping to be the first to hail the deck that the French frigate was in sight. The competition, mast against mast, was traditional.
Ramage finished his walk forward along the starboard side and crossed over to make his way back to the quarterdeck along the larboard side. There was very little sea; the Calypso was hardly rolling, giving a gentle pitch from time to time, almost a curtsy, as a swell wave came along the side of the island, part of the movement westward that began off the western comer of Africa, crossed the Atlantic and Caribbean, and finally ended up) thousands of miles away, in the muddy shallows of the Gulf of Mexico.
Groups of men squatted round their guns. Usually they were half asleep, but this morning they were wide awake, occasional whispers and stifled laughter showing they were cheerful enough. Ramage never understood how men could laugh and joke when, within the hour, they could be dead, shattered by grapeshot or torn apart by roundshot. It was enough that they were cheerful.
Yet, he realized, they were cheerful because they were confident; they were confident that death would not touch them. And they were confident because - well, because so far, under his command, they had been lucky. All the actions of the last few months, including the original capture of the Calypso and La Creole from the French, had been fought with very few casualties.
Would there be a great change of heart among them if they fought a bloody action? Would they then be less martial?
He doubted it: most of them seemed like Southwick: as keen for battle as schoolboys for a game of marbles or poachers for fat pheasants. And as his heels thumped the deck and he balanced himself against the ship's roll, he knew he was slowly becoming a better captain. It had taken long enough, but now he had finally absorbed the apparent contradiction that the captain who worried too much about his men being killed in action was likely to kill them by the dozen because he would be too timid. The boldest plan was usually the safest He realized he had never consciously taken a ship into action with that thought uppermost, but looking back on a series of actions, the fact was that he had often escaped with only a dozen killed and wounded when a prudent man with an apparently safer (more cautious) plan might have lost four dozen.
Was he being arrogant? Perhaps, and if arrogance on his part led to confidence among his men and success to an operation, then perhaps arrogance was no great fault. And of course it was the men's arrogance (that any one of them was worth three Frenchmen) that gave them the boldness which led them to succeed. The casualty lists usually bore them out, and certainly the Admiralty seemed to assume that one of the King's ships with a hundred men should be able to board and capture a French national ship with three hundred.
'Lookouts there - away aloft!'
Wagstaffe's shouted order broke into Ramage's thoughts and he realized he had not noticed how much lighter it had become in the last few minutes, minutes when he had just stood at the gun port staring at the wavetops gliding past The men were getting up from the deck where they had been squatting or sitting, groaning as stretched muscles gave them a twinge, teasing each other, some shivering with the dawn chill and swinging their arms, others spitting tobacco juice over the side through the port Ramage climbed the quarterdeck ladder to find Wagstaffe waiting anxiously at the rail, speaking trumpet in one hand and night glass in the other, obviously awaiting the first hail from aloft, while Southwick stood at the binnacle talking to Aitken, who would take over from Wagstaffe if any enemy ships were in sight, leaving the second lieutenant free to go to his division of guns. The Marines were forming up with much stamping and thumping.
Not one of the Calypso's officers approved of his plan. Ramage bad sensed that when he had explained it to them. Only Lacey was full of enthusiasm, and that was because his role was exciting. But the rest of them, from Southwick (who had been in battle dozens of times) to Kenton (who was relatively untried) had misgivings. None had said a word; to most captains they would have seemed full of enthusiasm.
Looking round at them in his cabin the previous day, when he had asked if there were any questions, he could guess how each man's mind was working. Each was reacting differently because he had a different personality. Southwick regarded it as wasting time: to him there was little wrong in getting alongside the other ship as quickly as possible and resolving the battle with his broadsides and boarding pikes. The master's strength was in his right arm, wielding a meat cleaver of a sword. Aitken, the quiet Scot, was intelligent enough to see the purpose behind Ramage's plan but he did not believe it would work, and nor did he think it necessary. Wagstaffe did not think the French would fall into the trap - that much was clear from the questions he asked - but if they did he could see the trap would then work. Young Kenton had never heard of such a plan and, because he was young, he was conservative: why fence with a foil when you could slash with a cutlass? Kenton had been at sea long enough to see that wars could not be fought without men being killed, but not long enough to try to reduce the odds. To him - and, to be fair, to the other officers, including the Marine lieutenant - one British frigate and a schooner were a match for any French frigate, and given that historic truth, proved in hundreds of actions, why monkey about ...
Aitken was a deep - thinking officer and Ramage could guess that the young Scot, wise beyond his years and almost certain to have his own command soon, was beginning to see things through the eyes of a captain, weighing risk against reward, risk against responsibility, risk against culpability. He knew that a senior officer, a commander-in-chief, Their Lordships at the Admiralty, were always reading the orders and looking at the results, rarely giving praise for success but quick to select and accuse a scapegoat if they saw failure ( even though, often enough, the original orders were too absurd to allow success).
Yet there were times when a captain trying to make the weights balance on those scales, putting the risk on one pan. the responsibility and culpability on the other, saw the responsibility and culpability pan drop with a decisive clang. So he did not take the risk because it would hazard his future. Rejecting the risky plan, he drew up a safe one. The risky plan might have saved many lives if it was successful; the safe plan was, all too often, safe only because the certainty of its success was bought with many men's lives.